Wednesday, December 16, 2009

I was thrilled when Obama won the election. He had some very positive things to say in his campaign speeches. He is intelligent and an excellent speaker. But most of all, he was the viable alternative to Raging McCain and Unqualified Palin. If the latter had been elected I think many horrific nightmares could have come to life.

But I always thought Obama was center-right, not center, and certainly not "liberal." It always amazes me to see how bitter and angry the far right is when they get lucky and either don't realize it or don't care because they would rather be bitter and angry. Obama COULD have been a liberal, but he's not. He's bent over backwards to accommodate the right. They just give him no credit for it whatsoever.

Rolling Stone has "Obama's Big Sellout" as the title of this informative piece. But I'm not sure if Obama sold out; I wonder if he was simply seen by many progressives with their rose-colored glasses on to begin with. Understandable, IMHO, given how far the country has shifted towards right-wing extremists since c. 1980. That's a long time to be waiting for a pendulum to begin moving back.

Yes, yes, there was Clinton, but we are still paying dearly for his failure to enact meaningful health care reform, for that horrific Telecommunications Bill, as well as his anti-welfare actions, NAFTA, the cuts to capital gains taxes for the wealthy, and his sexual peccadilloes which, while albeit absurdly focused upon (rather than his policies) by the media, effectively cast a pall over the Democratic Party and any hope for some time of getting center-right leadership again instead of extremist-right.

Anyway. On health care reform...I still cannot support what is floating around the Senate right now. The best I can do is give pros and cons and ask people to judge for themselves. I do hate to stop the momentum for health care reform, and am very concerned we might not get this momentum back again, after so many years of working and waiting for it. OTOH--this is a bad bill in so many ways. Robert Reich is a good read right now on the subject, although I disagree re expansion of Medicare...I think that would be our way out of the darkness if it were eventually applied to everyone. I'm certainly open to a private rather than public solution, but none has been proposed that is cost-effective and covers everyone decently. If there is one, I'm all ears, and here I'm talking to YOU, Party of "No."